The second-best argument I’ve seen for religion is the direct personal experience. I try to be humble about my view of the universe, and while I’ve seen nothing to make me think God exists, I’m not omniscient; I could be wrong. The person who deeply believes in the existence of Wotan, or the primacy of El Ahrairah, or the Age of Aquarius, may for all I know be entirely correct. Heck, for all I know, Jerry Falwell may even have a clue :eek:
But the best argument I’ve seen for religion is actually a set of arguments. This is reprinted with permission from the Principia Discordia; my very favorite of this set of arguments is bolded:
As for the idea that without God, “Evil” is meaningless, I’d turn that around: how does the existence of God make the concept of evil meaningful? If the word is problematic, we can refer instead to “suffering,” and develop an ethos based on the prevention of suffering.
Precisely because they make people enjoy themselves. Personal experience and received information from an extremely large number of other people cause me to believe that “enjoyment” is something that such an incredible majority of people find positive that I can readily use it to base my morality on.
Not that this proves morality. Nothing does. And there’s no need to. I don’t need rock-hard little rules to be able to handle life. I know that morality is opinion, and all I have to do is find the morality whose basis I find most logical.
He can claim it all he likes. If he wants me to care, he’d better back it up with something sensible.
Yup.
Assuming the peeper isn’t spotted, voyeurism is perfectly OK (with a bunch of other caveats, like the voyeurism inflaming drives within the peeper that ultimately lead to other behaviours). Since, in the real world, you can never be totally certain of not being spotted, I find voyeurism to be immoral.
The question of moral obligation to one’s self is not interesting to me. Let’s instead say that I see no harm in a lie itself. If it causes no harm, it’s perfectly OK.
They can be couched that way, but they can’t be justified.
Why is suffering evil? What standard do you apply to arrive at this conclusion?
Suppose the hard atheists are correct. There is no God, there is no afterlife, and everything and everyone comes to an end. And I died.
What difference does it make whether I suffered or not?
If the hard atheists are correct, all humanity is in the position of living on a planet which will be hit by an asteroid and totally destroyed - tomorrow. What imaginable difference does it make what we do or think or say tonight?
Forgot one thing: Shodan, could you explain how morality suddenly becomes “proven” or whatever you want to call it as soon as we assume God exists? I see no connection.
Well, I think one must take a wider view - Ockham’s Razor is merely a guiding principle rather than an inviolate law. In the specific case of ‘redundancy’, surely eg. having two testicles is actually overall a rather “economical” solution to the problem of procreating after having one damaged, and thus actually is a parsimonious explanation in a wider sense?
How humble is this opinion of yours? We are debating the scope of what can and cannot be shown by physical evidence. I contend that I can provide a feasible explanation for all phenomena, including those traditionally considered ‘moral’ (and therefore metaphysical) by nature. I cannot “prove” anything further than this about the moral framework I espouse any more than I can “prove” my favourite album is the best.
I contend that those phenomena associated with “evil” can be explained in terms of objectively detectable pain/stress indicators which I don’t like happening in my brain. I contend that no supernatural entity is necessary. You seem to be misunderstanding the scope of falsifiability and Ockham’s Razor.
Difference to whom? To the universe? None. To me? All the difference in the world. Even your suffering effectively makes a difference to me in that I do not suffer a condition called “psychopathy” and thus I have an empathic, compassionate response the suffering of others. Call it enlightened self-interest or negative utilitarianism, the approach is broadly the same.
“Morality” is purely a human construction which has no meaning or objective reality outside of human thought. It doesn’t even have any absolute definition within human thought. It’s completely subjective and contingent on variables ranging from the broadly humanistic, to the cultural to the personal.
Any argument that morality comes from “God” is rather silly in light of the fact that we have no reliable way of knowing what God thinks is moral. This means that even if God exists we are still on our own when it comes to determining what is “right” or “wrong.”
Shodan, could you provide some sort of empirical evidence that morality is anything but a product of human thought? can you prove we didn’t just make it up as we went along? While you’re at it, could you provide us with a scientific definition of “evil” and tell us how you know?
I don’t like suffering; best as I can figure, other entities that can suffer don’t like doing it either. Causing suffering therefore makes the world less of a world that I want to live in. Preventing sufferng makes the world more of a world that I want to live in.
I assume you don’t want to suffer tonight. Thefore I’ll try not to cause you suffering tonight.
Subjective? You betcha. Falsifiable? No way. Accepted on faith? Possibly so.
But I’d say that anyone with an ethical system, whether or not they believe in god, and excluding rational egoists, faces the same problem; and their faith in their ethical system is independent of their faith in God, unless they define “good” as “whatever that all-powerful being says.”
AHunter, I don’t think any atheist would claim “the silliness of asserting that this English monosyllable cannot be used by anyone, at any time, to refer to anything that isn’t spurious.” After all, someone can say that Elvis is the God of Pelvis-swivelling without referring to anything spurious. Words have multiple definitions, and atheism doesn’t mean rejecting any definition of the word God; it refers to rejecting the reality of the being(s) referred to by the primary definitions. Look at the referent, not the referrer.
You can do so, indeed. You still lack a rational basis for saying that “what most people want = moral”. This is just as arbitrary a choice for a morality as the most rabid fundamentalist claiming that whatever the Bible says is the basis for his morality. Neither has produced any evidence or reasoning for his position - simply asserted it.
And I am sure you recognize that “morality is what makes people enjoy themselves, because what people enjoy is moral” is tautological.
Actually, you do need a rock-hard rule. And you have chosen one, entirely at random, and with no rational justification at all. Just like some atheists assert theists have done with God.
No, you haven’t based your own morality on “something sensible”. There is no rationally established basis for your morality, just as there is no rationally established morality for his. Simple preference is all that either side has.
And the same objection exists. If you accept morality, which cannot be proven, why do you reject theism, which you also assert is unproven? If you cannot establish a rational basis for either position, why do you pretend that it doesn’t matter in the one case, but matters a great deal in the other? And what is your basis for arguing that either matters at all?
You’re still (deliberately, I believe) missing the point. I’m not making the factual claim that actions leading to enjoyment are morally right. That claim is impossible to make. Morality is opinion, as I stated in the post you’re replying to.
Theism, by quite stark contrast, makes a factual claim: God exists (for a certain value of “God”. That factual claim is entirely unsupported; I am therefore justified in rejecting it.
If a person were to say that turning out light bulbs is morally wrong, I could certainly have a discussion with him, but I couldn’t prove him wrong. That’s impossible, since morality is opinion. I have no problem with this and I wonder why you seem to.
Now for you: could you explain how morality suddenly becomes “proven” or whatever you want to call it as soon as we assume God exists? I see no connection.
Err, Shodan, you do realize that words have to be defined, right, and that you can’t prove definitions? As near as I can tell, Priceguy is defining morality and you’re challenging him to give evidence that proves his definition; this is an incoherent request.
It’s not my favorite argument, and you’re right that such an argument has been presented before, but you are misunderstanding the nature of the argument. It is NOT an emotional appeal. It hinges on the stated characteristic of God as being all good, like this:
God is all-good and all-powerful.
If God is all-good and all-powerful, he cannot allow suffering.
God allows suffering.
Therefore, God cannot exist.
It’s NOT an emotional appeal, it is a logical one. The weakness of the argument is that it must assume that God is all-good and all-powerful. So it only disproves one specific god, but doesn’t prove that there couldn’t be other gods that are NOT all-good, or that are not all-powerful.
At any rate, it’s most certainly not the way you are interpreting it, as if one is saying, “God is a big meanie so I don’t believe in Him.”
And let me point out one more thing:
An argument against God doesn’t necessarily have to be an argument against religion. One can NOT believe in God, but also NOT object to religion; that would be perfectly logical.
I understand completely what he has chosen to base his morality on. What has not been produced to date is any reason to believe that this choice is any more valid than any other.
Someone chooses “human happiness” as the basis for a morality. Why choose that, as opposed to, say, turning on light bulbs? There is no reason. The choice is completely arbitrary - an opinion, to use Priceguy’s phrasing, and one based on nothing at all.
Which means, as I mentioned earlier, the argument of evil does not work as a refutation of theism. It also means that there is absolutely no reason to accept that morality exists. And therefore all arguments that attempt to establish that someone “should” or “should not” do something, are invalid.
As I said earlier, you can set up a morality like this. It will by necessity be neither better nor worse than any other. There is no more rational basis to accept or reject a morality of human happiness than one based on professional sports teams or the desire to rape children.
Then all attempts to set up a morality are doomed to failure. Since your morality based on human happiness is meaningless, as is every other morality.
“This action is in accordance with my morality, but my morality is meaningless.” This statement is nonsense, as is every other moral statement ever made. “If A, then B, but I am not claiming A.” You see the problem?
Because, as JThunder points out, if all morality is meaningless, then the morality that leads atheists to condemn others for believing in God (or bombing abortion clinics, or imposing theocracy on the US, or kidnapping children and brainwashing them into theism) - all equally meaningless statements.
If all morality is meaningless, then atheists don’t get to condemn anyone else either. Your morality is no better than mine.
Sorry, it can’t be done. You have already discovered that no morality is “logical”. All have the same “basis” - nothing whatsoever.
Welcome to the rejection of foundationalist, rationalist purity, Shodan. If all you accept as true is the analytic, metaphysical questions become moot and skepticism wins the day. But to say that foundations aren’t logical doesn’t make any sense, really. Logic is a calculus designed to manipulate statements and preserve their truth (whatever that may be). The law of the excluded middle is no more “logical” than suggesting that “suffering is identical with badness” or “god is the source of all goodness”. It is what we do with our statements that matters.
All the more reason to reject universal morality, IMO, but what do I know.
Shodan, I’ll bother responding to that once you’ve answered the deceptively simple question that I’m now asking for the third time: could you explain how morality suddenly becomes “proven” or whatever you want to call it as soon as we assume God exists? I see no connection.
Indeed, but I said the best anti-atheist arguments take this form, not that this argument constitutes the best anti-atheist argument(s) in its/their entirety.
Someone could indeed say that Elvis is the God of Pelvis-swivelling, and someone else could laugh that one off-stage in the theist-vs-atheist debate by noting, to damn near everyone’s satisfaction, that this ain’t what we’re talking about when we use the G-word.
The question is, what are we talking about?
The best anti-atheist arguments I’ve seen and heard underline the extent to which atheist arguments revolve around an unstated idea of what the nonexistent God would consist of if God existed, and while it doesn’t tend to be Elvis it also may not be what the theistic faction considers to be God. Sometimes it is, because sometimes the theistic folks with whom atheists are having their debate really do believe God is a grey-haired dude in the sky who created the world in 7 days a handful of thousands of years ago. That God has thoughts on Tuesday that allow God to reach a decision on Wednesday that represent an opinion that God did not hold as of Monday, but henceforth constitute part of the Will of the Divine. That God makes Everything happen, on purpose. That God planned everything in advance. That God, like a combination of divine politician and Santa Claus, responds to appeals in the form of prayer with gifts and dispensations.
But sometimes that’s no more the concept of God held by the theist than “round tiny blue electron marbles in orbit like planets around bigger red proton and green neutron marbles” is the concept of subatomic particles held by the physicist.
The best theistic debaters prompt the atheists to define their terms, or to demonstrate that they have sufficient understanding of what it is that the theist means when the theist says “God”. It’s a good tactic and a good opening point for a general strategy. Even when the atheist comes back with “Well, it’s your term and your concept, why is it my responsibility to define it?”, as a good atheistic debater would, it turns the debate into a two-front contest: Are we in mutual agreement about what it is that we are saying we either do or do not think exists? – and, second, are we or are we not in agreement about what does in fact exist?
That leaves room for any of the following to be asserted by the theist at appropriate times:
• We agree about the following phenomenon (_______), we’re just arguing now about what to call it.
•You’re disagreeing with someone who isn’t here. I never made the claims you’re refuting, although someone who uses the same terms I do may have believed that.
•We agree about the existence of the following human experiences (_____, _____, _____) and now the question is why to refer to these with historically-laden religious terms, or why refrain from doing so. We’re now arguing about whether or not the human history of religion has tended to be about those experiences, or to originate with them, in which case the old words may be appropriate, or if instead the human history of religion has always been about spurious and nonreal phenomena, in which case using the old words may constitute obfuscation.
•We disagree about the actual valid existence of the following phenomenon (_____) regardless of what we do or don’t call it.
The typical atheist coming to this argument is accustomed to doing most of the arguing on the last of these, and generally around content that Occam eviscerated pretty easily. (That’s primarily due to the plentitude of obnoxious theistic sheeple whose arguing skills are pathetic, communicating skills in general not markedly better, and thinking skills in substantial question overall).